The Spring 2026 Graduate Art guest lecture series, organized by Jack Bankowsky and Jason Smith.

Tobi Haslett presents Jean-Pierre Gorin

This event is free and open to the public. RSVPs are not required.

Jean-Pierre Gorin (b. 1943) is a filmmaker and professor. In 1966, he met the French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard, and two years later created the Dziga Vertov Group. From 1968 to 1972, Gorin co-directed the films Wind from the East (1969), Struggle in Italy (1970), Vladimir and Rosa (1971), Tout Va Bien (1972), and Letter to Jane (1972). The films of the Dziga Vertov Group have long been recognized as seminal to the period of radical filmmaking of the late Sixties and early Seventies. They are historically significant for their pioneering critical reexamination of film language and its ideological implications.

In 1975, Gorin joined the faculty of the UC San Diego Visual Arts Department where his investigation of narrative led him toward documentary film. He attempted to redefine the parameters of the genre in a series of three essay films done in and around San Diego, which form a Southern California trilogy: Poto and Cabengo (1978); Routine Pleasures (1986); and My Crasy Life (1991), the latter of which won the Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. Since the completion of this work, Gorin has focused on the possibility of rethinking film narrative along musical structural lines. To this end, he wrote and directed Letter to Peter (1992), a feature-length video essay around Peter Sellars' staging of Olivier Messiaen's four hour opera, Saint François d' Assise, at the Salzburg Music Festival, Salzburg, Austria.

Tobi Haslett has written about art, film, and literature for publications including n+1, Harper's Magazine, and The New York Review of Books. He penned the introduction to Horse Crazy (1989), a novel by Gary Indiana that was reissued by Seven Stories Press (2018), and also contributed essays to exhibition catalogues including Radical Visions: Reza Abdoh(MoMa PS1, New York), a 2018 retrospective devoted to the art of the Iranian-American theater director and for Martin Puryear: Liberty/Libertá (Venice Bienniale, Italy, 2019). Haslett is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry Berlin.

Image: Still from Poto and Cabengo (1980), directed by Jean-Pierre Gorin.

See the full Spring 2026 Seminar schedule here.

Support for this series is generously provided by the following: Jack Shear, Brenda R. Potter, Brendan Dugan, Lisson Gallery, Beth Rudin DeWoody, BLUM, Hannah Hoffman, David Kordansky, and Jeffrey Deitch.

ArtCenter's Graduate Art program is based on intensive studio practice and rigorous academic coursework. The program is distinguished by its low faculty-to-student ratio that provides students with the attention and feedback they need to refine and achieve their artistic goals. Faculty and students are artists working in all genres—film, video, photography, painting, sculpture, performance and installation. A significant number of alumni have achieved national and international acclaim and often return to share their insights and expertise as visiting faculty and guest lecturers.